How we did it

Our test network was built around two PCs, a switch, a cable modem, three network cards, a software-based security scanner, and a hardware-based network analyzer to simulate and record typical corporate network traffic.

We used a Pentium III 800EB for the host machine. After installing 256M bytes of PC-133 SDRAM and a 40G-byte Ultra ATA/100 hard drive, we loaded it with Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 1. We then loaded Internet Security Systems' Internet Scanner onto a P5-200MMX running Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6a, 128M bytes of EDO RAM and a 4.5G-byte EIDE hard drive with 900M bytes of free space. Three Linksys LNE100TX cards with full-duplex, 100Base-TX capability were installed, with the first two cards in the Pentium III 800, and the third card in the P5-200. A Linksys BEFSR41 Cable/DSL Router with a built-in full-duplex 10/100Base-TX 4-port switch rounded out our network setup.

We used Spirent Communications' SmartBits 200 with four ML-7710 10/100Base-TX SmartMetrics Ethernet SmartCards to simulate a corporate network environment. We configured two cards for use on the LAN, building five Virtual Transmit Engines (VTE) simulating a typical subnet's background traffic of three workgroups, a server and an edge connection, for a total of 30M bit/sec of LAN traffic, 10% of which carried external destinations. We configured the remaining two cards to simulate two WAN connections, with three VTEs of 500K bit/sec each.

Janss is the president of Jansys Information Systems, a consulting firm that specializes in IS technologies for small businesses. He can be reached at bizcom@jansys.com.

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